Paid digital tools: There are many paid social media analytics tools out there, but three stand out for their network mapping abilities. Crimson Hexagon combines network visualization with real-time sentiment analysis to provide accurate and actionable insights about target audiences and their conversations. UberVU provides a real-time view of social activity via a number of informative graphs. These include geographic analysis, spikes and bursts, trending stories, and influencer analysis. Sysomos provides real-time visualizations and in-depth metrics, including geo-demographics and sentiment and influencer analysis.

What is your organization’s strategy for network mapping? What are your takeaways?

Now development professionals are increasingly pairing radio and “missed calls” to create interactive strategic/behavioral communications campaigns. These campaigns combine mobile—a disruptive and relatively expensive new technology—with an older free technology that reaches most of a target audience in many places. This synchronization keeps cost downs and, more importantly, prevents old and new technologies from competing with one another and creating useless noise. Two great examples are Radio Farm International’s use of radio programs to advertise a “missed call” service for agriculture and weather tips in Tanzania and SMS polling about farmers’ crop choices in Uganda.

Effectiveness and accountability of the humanitarian response increase, as communities improve their understanding of how to access relief services and understand aid operations, including constraints and challenges, as well as how to best communicate with aid agencies”

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The strugge between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” —Sent-ts’an, c. 700 C.E.

Who is your target audience?

The first question you need to ask before starting a communications project can come down to analyzing one key motivator for your target audience.

Values.

Before you can unite an idea with an emotion to inspire action, you have to understand why your target audience might not do or think what you think they should. But figuring out why otherwise intelligent and caring people might not think like you is often easier said than done.

The TED talk in the video below provides an excellent starting point for understanding and appealing to people’s moral intuitions. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory, and experimental psychology, the speaker, psychologist and professor Jonathan Haidt, explains how five fundamental ideas commonly undergird moral systems around the world: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. He further explains how people’s minds are designed to unite us into teams according to these fundamental ideas, divide us against other teams, and blind us to what’s happening.

Haidt’s research shows liberals worldwide value justice, change, and freedom from oppression—even at the risk of chaos. Conservatives, meanwhile, value preserving tradition and legitimate fidelity to rules that have stood the test of time—even at the cost to those at the bottom. Because these are often opposing moral visions, Haidt’s talk is a reminder that messages framed without audience research and an understanding of communications theory could inadvertently repel half your audience.

People love stories. They warm hearts and bring content to life in a way dry data and left-brained arguments cannot. The Web 2.0 stories they love most unite a positive emotion with dramatic narrative and strong visuals, encouraging people to share and act:

Positive emotion: Many people make decisions emotionally, so even the best logic-based arguments often fail to motivate people. When stories trigger a positive emotion, they stimulate good will, right-brain decision-making, and action.

Of course, facts are facts, and you have to have data to back up your stories. But how you tell your stories—according to your objectives and your audiences’ interests—is perfectly malleable per the above formula for success.

Once you have defined what makes the most sense for your audience, then set your objectives based on what you are trying to do. Inform? Energize? Resolve customer complaints? Foster collaboration? Crowdsource? Connect?

The last step is picking specific appropriate technologies, the opposite approach of attempting to replicate xPotomac’s innovations with a reluctant audience or client and different objectives. That’s because ignoring POST, falling victim to shiny object syndrome (otherwise known as fondling the hammer), and mindlessly copying tactics is often the recipe for activity without accomplishment—not innovation and ICT success.

Hi! I’m Monica

Welcome to eVentures in Cyberland: Through the Web 2.0 Looking Glass, and What Communicators Found There. My blog is about the fascinating—but sometimes wacky—ways the Internet, social media, mobile, crowdsourcing, and big data are changing the communications field. Some of my posts also have an international focus. [Read more...]